De Blasio: 239 immigrant children separated at border are in East Harlem

Mayor de Blasio speaks outside the East Harlem facility where 239 immigrant children separated from their parents at the border are being held.

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There are 239 immigrant children separated from their parents at the Mexican border who are now in the custody of a social service organization in East Harlem, Mayor de Blasio said Wednesday — and the youngest is just 9 months old.

At least one of the kids — a 9-year-old from Honduras — was brought 2,000 miles from the border by bus, the mayor said.

De Blasio revealed the figures after visiting the East Harlem location of Cayuga Centers, a social service organization that has $76 million in contracts with the federal government to care for immigrant children and which offers “immigrant foster care,” according to its website. His revelation comes after the city asked the federal government for such information — and did not receive it.

“Stop this broken inhumane policy and come clean with the truth. Who are these children? How many are they? Where are they? What is happening here?” de Blasio asked outside the facility. “How is it possible that none of us knew that there were 239 kids right here in our city? How is the federal government holding back that information? Holding back the help that these kids could get.”

De Blasio said the children arriving in East Harlem need both mental health assistance and physical help — with some arriving with lice, bedbugs, chicken pox and other contagious illnesses.

While Cayuga is caring for 239 children separated at the border, over the last two months it has cared for 350 such children, de Blasio said — noting it is “just one of the centers in New York City” with similar contracts from the federal government.

“These children are across a whole range of ages. The youngest to come here they told us is just9 months old,” de Blasio said. “We are talking about children who in some cases can’t even communicate. Have no idea what’s happening to them with no ability to be in touch with their families.”

Mayor de Blasio at East Harlem social service organization Wednesday, where 239 children separated from their parents are in custody. (Marcus Santos / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS)

Many of those at the center are from Guatemala, the mayor said.

He noted the center is a daytime facility — the children will be placed in temporary foster homes until they are reunited with their families — and praised the workers for their care of the kids. He noted the children are closer to services, like mental health, than at a federal detention center.

“The bottom line is that they should not have been taken from their parents,” he said.

The mayor noted a 9-year-old boy from Honduras named Eddie was separated from his mother at the border and sent to Cayuga.

De Blasio said Eddie’s mother is detained in Texas; he’d spoken to the child’s aunt, who said she, his grandmother and his detained mother are “worried sick.”

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“They can’t see him, and they don’t know what’s going on with him, and they don’t know what his future is,” de Blasio told reporters.

The child and his mother fled Honduras weeks ago, he said, escaping a life-threatening situation to seek asylum in the United States.

“The journey was dangerous but they were fleeing an even greater danger. And the one thing Eddie knew was he had his mother by his side,” de Blasio said. “And that continued until the moment our government took him away from his mother.”

That happened at the border, where Eddie was put on a bus, without any family, for the 2,000-mile ride to New York City — ending at the shelter in Manhattan, which has a contract to care for unaccompanied minor immigrants. The federal government has been treating the separated children as if they arrived unaccompanied, even though they were with parents.

“How is it possible that none of us knew that there were 239 kids right here in our city?" asks an outraged de Blasio. (Marcus Santos / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS)

A federal source told the Daily News on Tuesday that 311 children had been brought to New York’s lower 14 counties after being separated from their parents at the border. Gov. Cuomo had estimated there are about 70 of them across 10 facilities. De Blasio said earlier Wednesday his office simply doesn’t know the full extent.

“The sad fact is Eddie is literally one of countless children, because we’re not getting any honest reporting about how many children are being treated this way and where they are and what’s happening to them,” he said.

Cayuga Centers had previously refused to say whether any of the children it is serving were separated from parents at the border. Late Tuesday night, NY1 shot footage of young girls being led into and out of the shelter in the dead of night.

“We still don’t know the facts about those children and who they are and what’s happening to them,” de Blasio said.

Cayuga is one of at least three agencies with contracts to provide services to unaccompanied minor immigrant children in the city — others are Catholic Guardian Services and Lutheran Social Services, which have refused to answer questions about whether they have children separated at the border, as opposed to those who crossed alone, a population they have long served.

But outside a Bronx facility of the Catholic Guardian Services, an 11-year-old foster child told The News that there were children who were separated from their parents inside.

“Some of them was like from different places, not from here. Some of them were separated from their mom and dad and stuff,” he said.

“Some of them was like little-little, some of them were my age or like older than me,” he said.

At a second location of Catholic Guardian Services, employees again refused to say whether separated children were there. An employee at a different agency in the building said there were no facilities there to house immigrant children.

At Lutheran Social Services, attempts to reach President Damyn Kelly were unsuccessful. When The News asked his wife, Diann, if the organization was housing separated children, she said, “I am aware of that. I am aware they are housing children.”